The Monkey

 Stephen King's The Monkey is a pretty simple short story. In around forty pages, it tells the story of a father and a son that are cursed with a toy monkey that, the father suspects based on childhood experience, causes deaths whenever it smashes its cymbals together. Then then they get rid of it.

 It's not surprising that it's undergone some changes while being adapted into a motion picture. Writer/director Osgood Perkins, fresh off the unlikely success of Longlegs, has chosen to turn it into a splatterpunk comedy.

 The protagonist has now been split into twins, both played as kids by Christian Convery. One's mousy and meek, the other's a would-be-jock asshole; When they discover the Monkey, which was a gift from their absentee father (played in a fun prologue by Adam Scott, making great use of his endless reserves of mannered aggravation), they quickly discover that whenever someone turns the key on its back, someone gets killed. Gruesome deaths start piling up until they throw the monkey down a well.

 Twenty-five years later Hal (Theo James plays both grown-up twins) gets one last weekend with his estranged son Petey (Colin O'Brien) before his new stepdad (Elijah Wood) formally adopts him*. Their holiday is cut short by a phone call from Bill, who informs his brother Hal that The Monkey has resurfaced. Suddenly people are dying in hilariously macabre ways left and right and center again, and it's up to Hal and Petey to find out who's been turning the key on his childhood toy.

 It's a film that fully embraces the bizarre - it's been advertised as a 'trip', has funky 60s fonts in its title card, and lets Perkins channel all the overt weirdness that suffused Longlegs with menace into... a sort of humour this time around. Not all the jokes work - in fact, a lot of them fall flat - but they are constant, and the good ones are pretty damn good. Imagine it as an outsider version of a Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker film.

 The whole thing takes place in a world where cheerleaders line up outside police cordons to cheer when the coroner takes a body away, and a rookie, overwhelmed, seemingly stoned priest (Nicco Del Rio) is allowed to give eulogies where he unwittingly keeps making jokes at the expense of the deceased. One recurring knucklehead character looks like a missing member of Stephen King's beloved Ramones.

 The deaths, too, are overwrought and extremely messy. The heightened nature of the world extends to its implementation of the laws of physics: an electrocution here might make someone blow up like a gremlin in a microwave. The carnage ranges from simple shotgun blasts to Rube-Goldberg-like devices that end up with a cannon blast to someone's face. All of them are as over the top and gory as possible, though in a cartoony way that robs them of the impact they would otherwise have (there's a reason this was rated 15 here in the UK); This is a horror comedy that definitely isn't trying to scare anyone. Lots of CGI, unfortunately, but it fits well with the garish style of the bloodshed.

 Osgood Perkins has always been fond of careful visual compositions, and here, along with cinematographer Nico Agilar, he manages some truly outstanding visuals. The editing by Greg Ng and Graham Fortin is excellent, too, with a smash cut (involving a turn by Perkins in a minor, gloriously muttonchopped role) scoring one of the biggest laughs in the movie. And the monkey prop is glorious, especially its perverted grin. They reportedly had to replace the cymbals with a drum due to fears of the monkey-with-cymbals being copyrighted by Disney after Toy Story 3 - which is hilarious if true - but that's probably for the better as it allows the Monkey some cinematic flair. What with his drumstick twirling and everything.

 The script is all right; Like the acting, it's so mannered and willfully strange that it's hard to hold it to task for some of the film's excesses. I got a slight sense that Osgood, fully taking on the role of class clown, goes in a little too strong on the strangeness - some of the humour felt a bit forced to me, strained.
 But criticizing the film for that would be a bit mean, given how much of it is successful and how different the whole thing feels from anything else out there. And by the end it even lands on a sincere-sounding message of sorts, even if it is a little fucked-up. This is a great, unique, hugely entertaining slice of macabre nuttiness.

*: How does it compare to other films (Dayshift, 60 Minutes) that use unreasonable family demands to set the stakes? Well, here it isn't as much an ultimatum as a fait accompli, plus it's played solely for laughs.

Longlegs

 Ten families butchered over two decades, each a clear case of the one of the parents snapping and killing the rest. But here's the thing: in each one of the murder scenes there's a letter written in code, signed as LONGLEGS.

 FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a cripplingly shy and socially awkward FBI agent, is assigned to the case. Her gregarious superior (Blair Underwood), hopes her unnatural intuition can help shed some light when Longlegs strikes again.

 His hopes prove founded: with a little help from an unexpected Longlegs letter and a hilariously '70s guide to satanism, Agent Harker cracks the code and finds a new element to the murders that only muddles things further... unless you're willing (as Harker is) to indulge in supernatural explanations.

 Longlegs is the latest film from writer/director Osgood Perkins, one of the most fiercely idiosyncratic  genre directors working in horror today - and for better and for worse, this movie is an excellent showcase for his talents. It's a deeply grim, unsettling film, a creepy exercise in growing ambient dread that's expertly ratcheted up until it threatens to drown everything. The direction is precise and the shots often starkly beautiful, with a cohesive palette that alternates between deep earthy colours and chilly bone-white tableaus. Just from a visual and aural standpoint, the film is a marvel.

 But the script tries to juggle a little too much, and some of the elements are a little suspect. Chief amongst them Longlegs himself, Nicholas Cage in a fright wig and grotesque pancake makeup - Cage's talents are numerous, but there's a little miscalculation to how much weirdness he's allowed to indulge in here, his histrionics effectively creepy but too ridiculous for the film's otherwise tightly controlled tone. I think I get what Perkins and Cage were going for (a screeching injection of white noise into the film's more subdued static drone),  but it didn't really work for me.

 I did like the fact that the killer's into T. Rex and Lou Reed. Giving heavy metal a little time off to relax. And Cage does seem to be having a blast.

 Equally problematic is that the film is a little bit disjointed. Each one of the fairly well worn horror and serial killer movie tropes it brings into play are immaculately well crafted, but they end up clashing against each other once it becomes clear how they're supposed to slot in together. The film shines in its first two acts, and while there's a lot to like in the last one, it is more than a little bit clunky and nonsensical.

 Another problem is the film's stylish marketing campaign, a beautifully put together series of mysterious, gorgeously edited trailers which stands in contrast to the terrible, crass job trailers have been doing to promote their respective films for a couple of decades now. It's a petty thing to hold against the movie, not to mention my own damn fault - the slight disappointment of being overhyped - but there you go. For what it's worth, the film was never misrepresented by the trailers, and I suspect they'll prove influential.
 Oh, and please ignore any comparisons to Silence of the Lambs; That type of hyperbole will never do a movie any favours.

 For all my reservations and the time I've spent on them, I really like this movie. It's of a piece with other jagged, retro-tinged mood pieces, artifacts from a 70s experimental horror subgenre that never was. Osgood Perkins and his crew have made something that's pretty special, and I hope its success allows the director to pursue his batshit, uncommercial vision as far as he's willing to take it.